Lord of the Rings – 5/5 I am revisiting Lord of the Rings this Thanksgiving season, mostly while I do yardwork and household chores avoiding work and staving off boredom and frenetic energy. I am also listening to the audiobooks this time, and the last time I read the books was in 2004. I also previously read them twice: in high school and then in college when the movies came out. Here some things about my reading: I always skip the songs, which almost always […]
Well worth the re-read
I first read The Age of Misrule trilogy decades ago and seem to remember thinking it was only OK, but since then I’ve found my mind often returning to some of its scenes and ideas and so decided it was high time for a re-read. Based on the first book, so far my re-read has discovered that, while it has its flaws, my younger self was far too scathing in my initial assessment. In World’s End, we meet five strangers drawn together to try and […]
It’s complicated; romance, family, politics, whether one is dead or not, all of it is complicated
This book suffered from next book-itis. I started reading it but got distracted by wanting to read other books when I realized that two more bingo squares would give me a second bingo (Between the Bridge and the River and Eleanor and Park). I half-heartedly kept reading City of Brass while waiting to get to my main city library where I could pick up both books. At the time of stopping reading, I was feeling so so about the City of Brass. I was having trouble keeping track of the […]
A Dark Fantasy Metaphor for Internalized Misogyny
I loved this book enough that when I went to add it to my Goodreads list and saw it’s average rating of under 4.0, I was offended on its behalf. How dare other people not love this as much as me? But I get it. It’s a weird, wild read. The central plot is this: three girls live on an island where other teen girls keep mysteriously disappearing. Something sinister and otherworldly is behind this, and they must figure out how to work together to […]